Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory

by Duncan Black MacDonald

Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu‘tamir. His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid and tawallud, begetting and deriving. It is the transmission of a single action through a series of objects; the agent meant to affect the first object only; the effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What relation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a complex of causes acting together and across one another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is worth giving at this point. God creates in the man the will to move his hand; He creates the movement of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All is by God’s direct creation at the time. Further, could God punish an infant or one who had no knowledge of the faith? Bishr’s reply on the first point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid saying frankly that there was anything that God could not do. His answer on the second was that God could have made a different and much better world than this, a world in which all men might have been saved. But He was not bound to make a better world—in this Bishr separates from the other Mu‘tazilites—He was only bound to give man free-will and, then, either revelation to guide him to salvation or reason to show him natural law.

With Ma‘mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing the conception of God to a bare, indefinable something. We could not say that God had knowledge. For it must be of something in Himself or outside of Himself. If the first, then there was a union of knower and known, and that is impossible; or a duality in the divine nature, and that was equally impossible. Here Ma‘mar was evidently on the road to Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended on the existence of something other than Himself, and that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he dealt with God’s Will. Nor could He be described as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evidently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied to God; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances (jisms) only were created by God, and by “substances” he seems to mean matter as a whole; all changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from its nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms; or of free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no part in these things. He has given the material and has nothing to do with the coming and going of separate bodies; such are simple changes, forms of existence, and proceed from the matter itself. Man is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man and his body is but a cover. This true man can only know and will; the body perceives and does.

The last of this group whose views we need consider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very dubious morals; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun ar-Rashid, but highly favored by al-Ma’mun, in whose Khalifate he died, A.H. 213. He held that actions produced through tawallud had no agent, either God or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be produced by tawallud through speculation, and is, therefore, an action without an agent, and required even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magians will be turned into dust in the next world and will not enter either Paradise or Hell; the same will be the fate of cattle and children. That any one of the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is excusable. That all knowledge is a priori. That the only action which men possess is will; everything besides that is a production without a producer. That the world is the act of God by His nature, i.e., it is an act which His nature compels Him to produce; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with Him. It may be doubted how far Thumama was a professional theologian and how far he was a free-thinking, easy-living man of letters.

In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of Aristotle can be clearly traced. With Aristotle had come to them the idea of the world as law, an eternal construction subsisting and developing on fixed principles. This conception of law shows itself in their thought frankly at strife with Muhammad’s conception of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence, the crudities and devices by which they strove to make good their footing on strange ground and keep a right to the name of Muslim, while changing the essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind.

THE VISION OF GOD

It remains now only to touch upon one or two points common to all the Mu‘tazilites. First, the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on texts of the Qur’an and on tradition, that some believers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the other world; this was the highest delight held out to them. But the Mu‘tazilites perceived that vision involved a directing of the eyes on the part of the seer and position on the part of the seen. God must, therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they were compelled to reject the agreement and the traditions in question and to explain away the passages in the Qur’an. Similarly, in Qur’an vii. 52, we read that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne. This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and feet and eyes, the Mu‘tazilites had to explain away in a more or less cumbrous fashion.

With one other detail of this class we must deal at greater length. It was destined to be the vital point of the whole Mu‘tazilite controversy and the test by which theologians were tried and had their places assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing about the fall of the Mu‘tazilites. There had grown up very early in the Muslim community an unbounded reverence and awe in the presence of the Qur’an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant, the Prophet; the words, with few exceptions, are direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelligible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may have been brought forward later from the Qur’an itself, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damascus, has again played a formative part. So, in correspondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncreated and eternal Word of God; to the earthly manifestation in Jesus corresponds the Qur’an, the Word of God which we read and recite. The one is not the same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh were removed from us and the spiritual world revealed.

THE WORD OF GOD

That this view grew up very early among the Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have originated by a kind of transfusion of ideas from Christianity and not as a result of controversy or dialectic about the teachings of the Qur’an. We find the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological subjects. “Our fathers have told us; it is the faith received from the Companions;” was their argument from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas used to cut off all discussions with “Bila kayfa” (Believe without asking how); and he held strongly that the Qur’an was uncreated. The same word kalam which we have found applied to the Word of God—both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifestation in the Qur’an—was used by them most confusingly for “disputation;” “he disputed” was takallam and “one who disputed” was mutakallim. All that was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see the origin of what became later the technical terms for scholastic theology and its students in their shuddering repulsion to all “talking about” the sacred mysteries.

This opposition appeared in two forms. First, they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in the Qur’an and tradition and to draw consequences, however near the surface these consequences might seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), late as he is, which shows how far this went and how long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on the lafz (utterance) of the Qur’an; was it created or uncreated? He said readily that the Qur’an was uncreated and was obstinately silent as to the utterance of it by men. At last, persistent questioning drove him to an outburst. “The Qur’an is the Word of God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created and inquisition (imtihan) is an innovation (bid‘a).” But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated. Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur’an in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of men and the writing of it by men’s hands—all between the boards, as they said—was uncreated. Others were coming to deny absolutely the existence of the eternal Logos and that this revealed Qur’an was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bukhari, while holding tenaciously that the Qur’an was uncreated, refused to make any statement as to its utterance by men. There was nothing said about that in Qur’an or tradition.